How Much Time Should You Spend on Your Marketing? || Drafting Your Marketing Dream Team: Round 1

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam: It’s June and my social feeds are full of happy graduates. Gyi, are you seeing the same thing?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Happy graduates and wildfires in Canada.

Conrad Saam: Wildfires in Canada, all right, way to bring us down. Okay, so we’ve got good cop, bad cop already established. But for those of you who are not in Canada, or frankly on the East Coast which is having some terrible pollution problems in the air.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Detroit today actually has the second worst air in the world to New Delhi, India because of these fires.

Conrad Saam: That is a pretty big indictment there.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But let’s focus on graduation.

Conrad Saam: To those of you whose kids are winning state championships, heading off to college, throwing their mortar boards in the air, dressing up in beautiful outfits, and getting pictures taken, congratulations for making it through. Gyi, I believe your daughter just graduated kindergarten?

Gyi Tsakalakis: She did. She’s going to be a first grader next year. We’re very proud of her. She’s doing a great job.

Conrad Saam: Did you crow about your daughter’s GPA in kindergarten?

Gyi Tsakalakis: I don’t know if my daughter’s G — I don’t know if she knows she has a GPA yet.

Conrad Saam: Good.

Gyi Tsakalakis: What’s a good GPA these days?

Conrad Saam: A good GPA is kept to yourself if your kids are in college. There is a public service announcement for you from Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Gyi, what are we talking about today?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, I mean, there’s nothing else to talk about except more AI. We’ve done the AI. We’re doing more AI. We’re also going to talk about how much time and money you should spend on marketing. That’s a question that’s always coming up. And who should be on your marketing dream team? Building that marketing dream team, what roles do you need? A nod to our talk at tech show. But first, make the world go round.

[Music]

Intro: Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Teaching you how to promote, market and make fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam: All right. Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Let’s hit the news.

[Music]

Conrad Saam: Oh, boy, Gyi, a great article coming up from Joe Patrice on ChatGPT and bad lawyering. There’s no way we’re going to let you guys get into the podcast without talking about AI and the pitfalls. Gyi, what’s the story about ChatGPT and some really bad lawyering?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Lawyer uses chat GPT to cite cases that don’t exist, I believe, or bad law or something and, you know, as Joe mentions in the article, to me, it’s like, this isn’t really an AI story at all. This is a bad lawyering story. This be no different than if they pull, as Joe mentions in the piece that they just pulled the first 10 results from Google or something and said, “Oh, you know, I don’t know that this was not reliable.”

Conrad Saam: Be careful with that AI. In the hands of the inexperienced, you can get yourself in trouble or even disbarred, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Just like every other technology, right?

Conrad Saam: Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I mean, you know, be careful using your cellphone because if you accidentally share all of your client’s information on Facebook, you will also be a bad lawyer.

Conrad Saam: Speaking of AI and Lunch Hour Legal Marketing sponsor, Lawmatics, Gyi, Lawmatics has just integrated AI into their product. What can you tell us about that because I know you’re close to Mr. Spiegel.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, super cool. I think, you know, again, with the proper guardrails and the proper, you know, use cases, I guess, Lawmatics can help you write. It will re-write emails. It’s funny, I was just at this conference and this actually came up. And one of the lawyers said, “You know, we’ve been using ChatGPT to write letters,” and, you know, you can do a filter that empathy and stuff like that. And he said that it was doing a better job writing than most of the lawyers on his team in terms of writing letters and I think that in the same vein, I think this Lawmatics tool is going to be really powerful to help lawyers write emails and reword emails. It’s funny when you think about it. You’re like lawyers can’t write emails. But the truth is, is that it does make it more efficient, it gives you different versions, you can — I’m sure as this evolves, you’re going to be able to add different tones and intonations. And so, check out the new “Help Me Write” feature at Lawmatics, LM[AI].

Conrad Saam: And finally, I know you’re very deeply involved in tech show. You’re still involved in tech show but not as much as you were before?

Gyi Tsakalakis: No, I’m not. I am merely a humble fan and attendee of tech show.

Conrad Saam: All right.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But I will say that June is call for proposals’ month.

(00:05:00)

So if you’re a lawyer or legal tech person or legal marketing technology person and you want to start getting some recognition, become a thought leader. Submit a proposal; contribute to the community. We’ll put a link in the show notes. But I think it’s a great opportunity especially if you’re just starting to build your professional profile. Get involved with tech show, amazing community. Submit a proposal to speak. Up to see some new voices.

Conrad Saam: All right. After the break, when we come back, we’re going to answer the timeless question how much time should I spend on my marketing?

[Music]

Conrad Saam: Built for lawyers, Nota’s cloud-based business banking is perfect for your solo or small law firm. Easily set up categories to track your income and expenses in a way that integrates smoothly with your practice management, accounting and payment systems. Create instant transfers to your IOLTA that can pass any audit, print checks from your desk and get excellent service from reps who only work with attorneys. Online at trustnota.com/legal. Nota, banking built for law firms like yours. Terms and conditions may apply.

[Music]

Gyi Tsakalakis: 76% of lawyers say they are overworked and part of the problem is tedious tasks, like manually retyping information when drafting. LAWYAW’s document automation enables law firms to fill sets of word-based documents and court forms, cutting legal drafting time by 80%. Use intuitive features like conditional logic and e-sign to simplify drafting and improve client experience. Learn more at lawyaw.com. That’s L-A-W-Y-A-W.com.

So Conrad, I’m just recently back from Vegas from a 360 advocacy lawyer seminar which I was very grateful to be invited to speak by my good friend Steve Gerson. Thank you, Steve. And one of the questions that was brought up at this seminar by a lawyer was, you know, how much time should I be spending on marketing, right? And this came up in Maximum Lawyer on Facebook.

Conrad Saam: Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I think we have alluded to that before but it keeps coming up. What’s the answer? How much time should we be spending? How much time should we be telling people to spend on marketing?

Conrad Saam: Guess what? It depends, Gyi.

Gyi Tsakalakis: It does.

Conrad Saam: You know, I look at this in a lot of different ways. Time and money are interchangeable, right? And so you may have a lot of one or the other, and you’re really trading one for the other when you’re thinking about how much time you want to actually put into this. And there’s a spectrum to this. You think about the brand-new lawyer, right? You got no money. You have a ton of time.

So the first thing that you have to think about when you’re dealing with time and money is, you should be spending close to 100% of your time on marketing. And the reality is that will generate work without spending a bunch of money on pay per click or LSAs or SEO or websites, or things like that, right? And so you can put that time into it. You then also get attorneys who are doing well. They don’t want to put time because they want to be a lawyer. They’re reality. They’re kind of cognizant what they want to be doing with their time is lawyering not marketing. And in those cases, you find those marketing channels that work really well when you just throw money at it. I’d use pay-per-click as an example of that. Local service ads as an example of that.

On the flip side, you have lawyers who are like, you know what, I talked to one of my new favorite positioning lawyers, Charlotte Towne, the mermaid lawyer, and she says, “You know what,” she does all of her marketing is on social media. That is time that she puts into social media. She doesn’t spend any dollars but she does it through creating content. She’s decided not to spend the dollars because she wants to put the time in. Flip side, you don’t want to spend the time so put the money in if you have it. But you got to have one or the other.

And then finally, at the furthest end of that extreme, Gyi, I think you have the lawyers who have no desire to do anything with the practice of law, but they’ve really become CEOs and they’re spending both time and money on marketing their firm and they’re spending zero time on lawyering. And so my honest answer to you is it really equates to how much of a growth mindset do you have. If you are a solo with a big growth mindset, put a lot of time and/or money into this. If you are a solo, happy kind of keeping the lights on and you want to spend your time lawyering, you can do that but your growth ceiling is pretty low.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So I think I generally agree with most of what you said.

Conrad Saam: Okay.

(00:10:00)

Gyi Tsakalakis: There’s certainly the spectrum from if you’re brand new, you don’t have any money, you’re going to spend a lot of time trying to generate business.

Conrad Saam: Sure.

Gyi Tsakalakis: If you got an established practice and you want to practice, then you’re probably going to either delegate that to somebody at your firm, maybe you’re going to hire a CEO of your firm like you said, maybe you’re going to hire a marketing person, maybe you’re going to outsource it. But I also think about a lot of the lawyers that we talked to that we know listen to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. And for most of them, I think the answer is some combination of both.

Conrad Saam: Sure.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And the first thing that I think about is if you’re the face of your law firm or if you’re a small firm, it’s going to be very hard for you to position your firm behind a trade name or logo, I think. You need a lawyer to be forefront of the firm and so that buy-in is of itself. There’s going to be some time spent on creating some kind of content, whether it’s being active on social media.

Conrad Saam: Sure.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Or whether it’s creating video content. Now, how much time should you spend on that? You know, I think there’s ways. It can be to batch, right? Record once and then chop it up.  So from a tactical standpoint, if I had to twist your arm and I’m like, all right, you’re a four-person law firm.

Conrad Saam: Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And all the lawyers are running their own books of business. They’re all running their own cases.

Conrad Saam: They’re generating their own cases.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But they’re doing both.

Conrad Saam: Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I’m assuming that most of our listeners are probably doing some combination of both. I’m just really trying to drive at the question of for this listener persona.

Conrad Saam: Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I’m not a small firm, you know. I’m at a consumer-facing practice firm. I have to work some cases but I also recognize I got to spend some time. You know, how much time we’re talking about, and, to the point, I totally agree with you. It totally depends. There is no right answer. But one of the things, I’ll just give you one answer. Start somewhere, carve out 5 to 10 minutes a day, and start getting active on social media. Maybe you’re just engaging with people that you know in your local community on Facebook or something but my thing is it’s like I think they get overwhelmed because they think about this like, oh, you know, I’m looking at some of the lawyers that you’re talking about these TikTok lawyers who are cranking out video after video and they’re just like I can’t keep up with that so what’s the point?

And I don’t know if that’s the right way to look at it. I think you got to start somewhere. Start with a couple of minutes here and there and I will start with like the small time so you know you’re waiting for motion call or maybe if you still commute. I don’t know if you find some small time to like invest some time in it. But, just constructively if you’re going to do anything, I guess I would start with a few minutes here and there on social media. I think that can go a lot further than a lot of lawyers recognized.

Conrad Saam: I mean there’s nuances to your comment. I think the time that you spent on social media is often wasted because you’re doing that part of it wrong, right? A lot of your time should be spent on connecting with people as opposed to just posting stuff that no one reads.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So that’s a different issue, though.

Conrad Saam: It is.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So when you say —

Conrad Saam: Spend the right time, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Spend the right time and that’s the other thing that I wanted to, at least, because there’s another thing that came up in Vegas was this idea that it’s a waste of time and this idea of like, well, if you can’t measure it, you know, hey, I posted on Facebook and I didn’t get a click and a phone call and a hire. That was a waste of time. I don’t know if I buy that.

Conrad Saam: And in fact, I will tell the listeners that you don’t buy that. Gyi does not believe in if you can’t measure it, you shouldn’t do it. And I would 100% fall into that. Interestingly, like my thoughts on this has really involved and I think it’s the changing consumer behavior on the web that has evolved my thinking on this. But like just because you cannot measure a direct, I will kick this metric all over the place. Because you cannot measure a direct ROI does not mean you should not be doing that thing. That is just absolutely insane. That is a very simplistic perspective on the world and the way the consumers behave if that’s the way you think about things. It’s just not the way the world works.

But bluntly, I think about I’m going to give you a very kind of MBA answer. This all goes into how aggressively you want to grow the firm. And my assumption here is that if you are trying to aggressively grow your firm, you should be spending as much time as necessary lawyering to keep your cash flow going and put everything else into growing your firm, right, if that’s your objective.

Now, that’s not — I think your question here is, hey, Conrad, that’s not everyone’s objective, can you start out smaller than that? And the answer is, yes. But the reality is when you’re putting — and we’ve used this content before when we’re using your percentage of revenue that you’re putting into market. It’s the same thing, money is time, time is money and it’s the amount of revenue that you’re putting into your marketing. But you know for our what we call the high growth businesses, they’re putting over north of 25% of their revenue into their marketing, right? And so that is high growth. So to turn that directly into time, putting a quarter of your time into your marketing if you have a high growth mindset, that is not insane. That is not insane.

(00:15:02)

Gyi Tsakalakis: I like that benchmark.

Conrad Saam: Yeah, 25% of your time.

Gyi Tsakalakis: 25%, there you go.

Conrad Saam: There you go. You’ve it here first, people. And by the way, listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing accounts for 25% of your time.

Gyi Tsakalakis: In the marketing bucket?

Conrad Saam: Yeah, because you’re getting smarterer by listening to us.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Okay.

Conrad Saam: 25% of your — but then the other part of this is like, yeah, you can spend 5% to 10% of your time on these types of activities or 5% to 10% of your revenue on these types of activities and you’re going to do a good job keeping the lights on. But you’re not in a growth mindset.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, I don’t know. I guess there’s — maybe you don’t probably intending to do this, but there seems to be this implication that if you’re not spending a bunch of money that you’re not in a growth mindset. I just don’t buy it. There’s a lot of lawyers out there that I know listen to this podcast that, you know — I don’t want to put words in your mouth, you can define growth mindset, but they’re eager to grow, they want to grow but the business model of many firms is not $20,000 a month SEO budget. It’s not $20,000 a month PPC budget, and they’re doing just great. They’re multimillion-dollar firms.

Conrad Saam: 100%. And this is the key here. These things are interchangeable. Time and money, money and time are interchangeable and you can really grow your firm if you put a ton of your time. What is the beauty of the socials happening right now, and we’ve talked about dark social in the past and all this stuff. But the beauty of that is that you can grow your firm.

So we talked about the examples that come right off my head are Dean Blatchford in Toronto tax lawyer that we talked about who does the baseball game, right? That’s all he does. He puts a ton of time into that, like, that is the driver of his firm’s success. I just mentioned the mermaid lawyer, Charlotte Towne down in Florida. She doesn’t put any money into advertising but she puts a bunch of her time into content generation and connecting with people on social. And that is very, very, very successful. So I look at these things as interchangeable. What you can’t do is not spend any time or money and then be pissed when your law firm doesn’t grow.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Makes sense to me.

Conrad Saam: All right. When we come back, we are going to make our two picks for two members of your marketing dream team.

[Music]

Gyi Tsakalakis: If you’re like a lot of lawyers that we talk to, you’re trying to grow your firm but you’re having trouble doing more in a day than just managing your systems.

Conrad Saam: So what you really need is a simple system that can easily identify where your possible leads are coming from, analyze practice performance and easily sync up matters.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Now, I’ve got to admit. I’m both an investor and adviser to Lawmatics and the reason is I’m super excited on what Matt’s building over there.

Conrad Saam: So you don’t have to change your entire system. Lawmatics easily integrates with MyCase, Clio, Smokeball, Rocket Matter and lots of others.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So take a test drive today with Lawmatics to make client intake easier, lawmatics.com.

Hey, Overcast users out there. We see you. Gone a little bit of a bump from the Overcast crowd and we appreciate you. We are always asking for Apple reviews but you Overcast users can really help us out too. Go give this episode a star. And whenever you find an episode helpful, give it a start too. It really helps people like you find the show so we will stop being so Apple review-focused and give you some Overcast love. Thanks so much.

Conrad Saam: All right. We’re coming back. Gyi and I did a presentation at ABA tech show where we outlined 12 different roles for a marketing dream team. If we were to hire the marketing dream team for a law firm, there are 12 different roles that we included on that. We are going to highlight — I’m going to ask Gyi to pick one and I’m going to pick one, of the marketing if you were to internally hire a marketing dream team.

I’ve got my pick, Gyi. Who’s your pick and who do you want to talk about?

Gyi Tsakalakis: I’m going to pick the local social butterfly.

Conrad Saam: All right. Tell me more about the local social butterfly. What does this person do? How do you find them and how do you deploy them in your firm?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, we set this up as this would be a person you hire, which I think, you know, this is certainly could be a full-time role or a part of an internal role. It could be somebody, you know, could you independently contract this somebody in the local community, maybe. But the role itself is you’re in the community. You know, you’re building relations with local businesses. You’re going to these local events and you’re using social media tools to demonstrate those connections. You know, maybe you’re sponsoring.

And I think again, even in the local context, maybe even there’s some overlap with like being a guest on local podcast but you’re in the local community socializing and connecting with folks. And again, this is the type of thing that lawyers have been doing a long time but I think that the missing piece has been that they’re bringing it online.

(00:20:02)

They’re getting better at it. You know, we’ve talked about some examples of that but this is a key role. If you serve a local community, this is how you get that — you start building that brand affinity. People start knowing who you are, knowing what you’re all about and you’re out there publishing on it too on social media.

Conrad Saam: I like this role because one of the things you can do with this person, the ideal person for me in this role, they’re already established. You’re not trying to build relationships in your community, you’re basically leveraging someone’s pre-existing relationships in a community. And so, you can do that through a really, really solid hire. And the other part of this — and these people are if they’re out there, they’re easy to find because they’re already involved on social, right? They’re already very heavily involved in that community and so you can identify them and reach out to them.

And I do think this can be kind of that part-time gig. I think this can be, you know, in a better content, this is someone who’s maybe coming back to the workforce on a part-time basis. This is someone who’s the local videographer, does wedding videos on the weekends but doesn’t have a daytime gig. But it’s really finding someone to leverage their network to expand your own. I think this is a really, really good role and I’ve seen lots of law firms, very successfully, look for these types of people and they’re easy to find. If they’re out there, they’re easy to find.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. And if you’re struggling to find, one idea for looking for them is just go look for local hashtags, right? So if you’re in a smaller city, even in a big city, but like, you know, go look for the hashtags around the geographic location. I know here where I am there’s a bunch of whether it’s photographers or bloggers or foodies, just add your city to that hashtag and they’ll start to pop up in your Instagram feed.

Conrad Saam: Great role. This is a very good role. I don’t think it’s an expensive role and it can be amazingly effective.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Cool. What do you got?

Conrad Saam: You know my pick is? I’m going to go the complete opposite side on the spectrum. I want to hire the mathematician. I want to hire someone who not only understands the business math of what we’re looking for. You know, you and I talk about this all the time. You’re looking for consultations or ideally clients instead of leads. They understand the business math of what you’re getting to but also someone who can stitch all the systems together to create the business math which means they also understand where those systems aren’t perfect.

You and I talked about earlier on the podcast, you know, if you can’t measure it, you shouldn’t do it. Well, the really good mathematician understands that that is garbage, right, and that you should still be doing things even though you don’t have a perfect avenue to the perfect formula because math is sometimes the tracking is sometimes imperfect. And so the person who can understand that and understand the business metrics and drive those business metrics, key hire, really, really key hire. And that’s probably going to be a much more expensive person than your local social butterfly. And if you don’t have the budget for this mathematician, that role has to be filled within your organization and you as the leader of your firm need to be making sure that that happens.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So when you think about the mathematician in this context, are you thinking more like CFO or are you thinking more like marketing technology analyst?

Conrad Saam: I think it’s more the latter. So this is not a CFO. This is not one who thinks about balance sheets or cash flow or accounting metrics. This is someone who loves call rail, right, and is going to get into the depths of how do I integrate call rail into my intake management software so that my data gets automatically pushed and again and I get really good information. This is someone who’s going to try and understand, oh, this lead, this lead turned into a client and we don’t really know where they came from. Is there anything we can do to find the data to determine why Mary hired us and I’m going to go back and listen in on Mary’s first phone call to see if I can answer that question. It’s that person. It’s the person who is going to lose their mind when your phone call answer rate drops below 97%.

So it’s not really a CFO role. It’s a marketing analyst combination of technology, business insight and kind of that dirty hands-on roll up your sleeves and answer the question when it’s not right in front of you role.

I once wrote a piece a long, long time ago. But I once wrote a piece about you need to hire optimistic marketers and pessimistic analysts. And this is someone who doesn’t just believe the data that’s put in front of them but they want to know what’s behind the data when it’s put in front of them.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Love it. You know, I’m thinking about this mathematician and it’s interesting too because as you mentioned, it’s kind of the other end of the spectrum from the local social butterfly because like what’s the ROI of the local social butterfly, right? Because, you know, as you talk about dark social many times, some of your qualitative intake questions people might say, I know the local social butterfly, right? Or I listen to the local social butterfly’s podcast or saw or met an event or that’s how I heard about you and that’s great.

(00:25:05)

But you know what I always wonder about is in this kind of like the challenge to the mathematician is people are searching on your name and the mathematician, they’re going to be like, hey, if you got last click attribution in place and someone clicks on a branded search ad and they convert.

Conrad Saam: Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Mathematicians are going to be like PPC, brand PPC campaigns paying off if they click on an organic listing. You know, mathematicians are going to be like SEO, the SEO plan is paying off.

Conrad Saam: Right.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But my question is where does the mathematician put the, I came in, I searched on the name, it’s a branded search and the qualitative data is I don’t know how I found you. Where does that live in the mathematician spreadsheet?

Conrad Saam: Say it was a branded click?

Gyi Tsakalakis: It’s branded click.

Conrad Saam: Okay, that falls into —

Gyi Tsakalakis: Maybe a brand bucket, call it brand bucket.

Conrad Saam: Well, so that falls into the big brand bucket of I’m not actually sure which specific individual thing it was it made me call you. And the reality is there’s not one individual thing. This is a mathematician who understands the reality of the multi-touch world. And, you know, back in the day, Gyi — and this does not go that far back but you know much of what we did was direct response and it was easy to segment this stuff out.

It’s changed. The game has changed and we are dealing with multi-touch and we are dealing with the growth of brand awareness and brand affinity, right? And so, the real mathematician understands that this is not a simplistic MBA answer to the I need to draw an accurate pie graph of where all of our clients came from or I’m going to calculate the ROI of every single dollar we spent. They understand that that is not reality.

And I think to understand that you need to have — this is me generalizing and I’ll be mean to MBAs. The MBA who just got out of the school thinks that you can draw that perfect pie graph and calculate the ROI down to the penny. The grizzled veteran understands that that is a fool’s errand and understands that these things work together and trying to get to specificity on those things doesn’t work.

And so you want the analytical side that understands the reality of the world in which we actually function but can also critically understand when things are not working or when things are in anomaly and when things — and this is why I said, kind of you want that cynical mathematician to dig into where you think things are working or aren’t working to really, really identify that.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I think it’s such an important point because we keep hearing this, oh they’re not measuring, you know, there’s no attribution on it and so therefore stop doing it. And I’m just like, it’s so wrong. So if you don’t have a brand bucket, if you’re a mathematician doesn’t have a brand — I think the brand bucket is a good way to look at it, right? And even if you’re working with an agency, that’s the other thing too that we see all the time is the agencies will take credit for the brand.

Conrad Saam: Yes.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And I’m like, no, no.

Conrad Saam: Well, hold on.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Go ahead.

Conrad Saam: Let’s go deeper on this. This is so disgusting it makes me nauseous. I hate this industry. The way they do this, and especially if you do not have insight or look at your Google ads campaign, okay? They’ll run an ad for your name. The click that is generated on that ad for your brand is generated by all the other stuff that we can’t actually track. And the agency will then lump that in to the business that has been generated by your advertising campaign, which is utterly garbage bullshit and they know that and they’re pulling the wool over your eyes.

So if you’re not segmenting out brand among PPC, and even SEO work, right? Like your agency is either stupid or deliberately pulling the wool over your eyes.

Gyi Tsakalakis: No, they’re not stupid. They know. They know exactly what they’re doing.

Conrad Saam: Some of them are stupid, Gyi. Some of them are stupid.

Gyi Tsakalakis: The other one that — so that I’m glad you called out SEO because I think that’s the same issue, right? Oh, organic traffic is up. Well, yeah, it’s brand traffic, right?

Conrad Saam: Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis: If you’re not segmenting brand, non-brand traffic and organic, and then I may give you another one that’s recently cropped up is, you know, we see some of the social media consultants now that are clumping paid an organic social media. Those two things are not same thing. Facebook as a referrer, facebook.com as a referrer isn’t giving you nearly enough information because if your firm, you’re doing the local social butterfly thing and you’re posting, you know, stuff on Facebook that’s causing people to click through and call you from your organic Facebook stuff versus someone who’s managing paid Facebook ads, like you better be segmenting your organic and paid social media from each other as well because they’re going to taking credit for all the pictures of your kids graduating kindergarten that you’re posting on Facebook. And they’re going to say, look, we generate all this traffic from Facebook.

Conrad Saam: And this is why it’s important to have the mathematician and the social butterfly, right?

(00:30:02)

These are disc profiles that do not overlap very much at all. And so, I do think this is important that, you know, the agencies just do such a deliberate job in many cases of conflating attribution to make themselves look good. And this is another reason why I like the mathematician as the in-house person who is a complete cynic because they’re not going to believe the horseshit that a lot of agencies will try and shovel to you.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So, I was going to say the opposite. Let me — I agree with that point that the — I agree that you should have an internal resource, but I was going to say, we beat up on the agencies all the time. But, you know, a lot of our listeners, they’re doing this themselves in which case they should be beating up themselves because they just don’t know what they’re doing.

But two, even your in-house marketing person, right? If they’re not segmenting this stuff and you’ve got a marketing plan and they’re supposed to be driving whether it’s non-brand paid search traffic, non-brand organic search traffic or they’re managing paid social, it’s the same problem. And so it’s not necessarily just the agencies do this and not everybody’s doing it. I was being very condescending to the agencies and saying they’re doing it intentionally and a lot of them are, you know, in Conrad’s point is some of them just don’t even know. It’s very true on the in-house side of it at least in my experience. Conrad, you can tell me if your experience is the same. But a lot of times it’s just a lack of knowledge on the internal, on the in-house side where they’re like, oh, I didn’t even think about that.

Conrad Saam: Right.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So it’s a really important point to segment that brand both from a paid on organic search as well as the social media.

Conrad Saam: Well, thanks everyone for spending some time with us. If you work at a digital marketing agency, I will put Gyi’s personal address in the show notes so you can send him a glitter bomb.

We will see you in two weeks. Be well. Happy graduation to everyone. Enjoy the beginning of this amazing summer.

[Music]

Male: Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you’d like more information about what you heard today, please visit legaltalknetwork.com. Subscribe via Apple podcast and RSS. Follow Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

[Music]

Continue Reading